Last week I attended ICC (french acronym for Innovation, Competitiveness, Knowledge) meeting in Paris. Here are my feelings based on conferences I attended and products I saw.

1°) 2.0 is going mainstream. It’s not fashionable anymore, it’s a real big trend. Beside pure players, software majors such as IBM Lotus or Microsoft are now joining the list of those who say that intranets are going 2.0 too.

2°) An evolution of the concept of information. Information is not something you stock anymore but it’s a flow you have to catch. So don’t ask “how to stock it” but “how to mobilize it”. On consequence is the concept of PKM (personnal knowledge management): everyone is reponsible for the good use of information, and in the other hand it’s the sum of all individual uses that brings added value to collective use.

3°) Duality between collaborating with and collaborating on. What’s supposed to be the central point of collaboration? The individual that produces information or the produced information? Is that the frontier between 1.0 and 2.0? I don’t think so. And both are necessary because they don’t have the same purpose. You can’t structure an organinization without any process or document, you can’t be innovative or reactive neglecting informal information and exchanges between people.
4°) We have to bring information back in the center of the organization. According to IBM, in 2010, half new products or services ideas will come from outside the organization. The stake will be to catch peripheral flows, and transform them in business inside the organization. That matches the duality I mentionned before: there is a structuring information at the center of the organization and an informal and unstructured one all around, at the border, sometimes inside, sometimes outside, that gives agility and innovation. Managers have to find a way to catch this last one that is forgotten by all the workflows.

5°) The individual and the group: what’s valuable is not to focus on individual, neither on the group but on the individual IN the group. The organization’s wealth is the individual because he generates information and reflexion, but what gives added value to what he generates is the confrontation with other people’s ideas, what new uses those people can make of one’s ideas.

As a conclusion the consciousness now exists that’s there a big part of usefull information that’s not used nor is capitalized. Beside the information that structures organization we have to find a way to catch the informal information, promote it and tranform into something useful and valuable.